The Morning Plum

* How serious is Obama about hanging tough in debt talks? Was Obama’s tough talk at his press conference a sign that he’s genuinely going to keep insisting on real revenue increases from Republicans, or just a way to mollify the Dem base in advance in preparation for the bad deal he knows we’ll all have to swallow eventually? That’s the question that many Dems are gaming out right now as the debt talks grow more urgent, and it appears the insider “smart money” is on the latter.

* Uh, hello press corps? Romney has now flip-flopped on a central campaign message: Kudos to NBC for pressing Mitt Romney yesterday to justify his continuing claim that Obama made the recession “worse,” something he kept repeating even after it was repeatedly knocked down by independent fact-checkers.

I’m with Steve Benen: Why is this not a bigger deal this morning? Romney is now insisting that he never made the claim that was quite literally one of his central campaign messages until yesterday. This is far more important than any silly little error Michele Bachmann makes about regional trivia.

My handy Plum Line calendar tells me Dems have exactly 21 days — three weeks — to persuade the GOP to agree to new revenues or to cave.

* Default really could happen: Paul Krugman says those who think the GOP won’t put the global economy in peril rather than agree to any revenue increases don’t understand the true nature of today’s GOP, and says that Obama must not buckle if there’s any hope of putting an end to this kind of blackmail.

* The conservative view of “class warfare”: Conservative media figures are having a grand old time accusing Obama of “class warfare” because he wants to end the tax break for corporate jet owners. As it happens, ending that tax break would only save a trivial $3 billion. But it’s still unclear why it’s not “class warfare” to insist on keeping that tax break while calling for fixing the deficit through cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that will disproportionately impact the non-wealthy.

* And Obama got GOPers to defend corporate jet tax break: If Obama’s goal in hammering away at that point was to get GOP officials to publicy defend it en masse, he certainly seems to have succeeded.